Pakistani Lunch- chicken biryani with peas, fish fry, raita and salad

PAKISTANI CUISINE

Pakistani cuisine is rich in flavor and variety. After having some Pakistani food if you indulge in western food you will find that western food is bland and has no flavor. This is due to the richness of spice in Pakistani cuisine as compared to any other cuisine in the world.

Pakistani cuisine slightly varies in its own states. Different cuisines within Pakistan are

Sindhi cuisine

Punjabi cuisine

Muhajir cuisine

Pashtun cuisine

Kashmiri cuisine

Baloch cuisine

Pakistani cuisine uses lots and lots of spices, whole and in powdered form. Garam masala is a popular spice powder made up of different quantities of spices. Garam masala gives a rich flavor to any dish, vegetarian or non-veg and it will make you crave for more. Furthermore Pakistani cuisine uses oil and ghee abundantly which makes its dishes full of flavor. The Pakistani cuisine uses so much oil that a non-Pakistani like us can use the oil on top of any dish to make various other dishes that requires oil.

Some of the common herbs and spices used in the Pakistani cuisine are brown cardamom, green cardamom, cinnamon, cloves, nutmeg, mace, cumin seeds, chili powder, turmeric, black pepper, coriander leaves and bay leaves.

This cuisine uses all the legumes in interesting ways to make side dishes and main dishes.

Pakistani cuisine like my country’s Sri Lankan cuisine has every single accompaniment with the main dish. It can either be drinks like lassi, gola ganda, sugarcane juice lemonade sherbet, rooh afza, shikanjabeen almond sherbet, sherbet-e-sandal, kashmiri chai, qehwa, sathu and thaadal.

There are also many varieties of tea served along with the Pakistani cuisine and there is even tea with spice that has become famous all over the world as masala chai (spice tea).

There are countless desserts that are sweet and spicy and as stated above some Pakistani deserts are flowing with ghee. Some of the desserts that are famous are firni, kulfi, falooda, kheer, kheer khum, gajraila, barfi, baklava, gulab jamun and rasmalai.

In any Pakistani home, dinner is the most important meal of the day, thus dinner requires the most amount of time to prepare. Contradictory to the norm Pakistani dinner is fitting for KINGS.

Let us learn to make biryani the Pakistani style. This meal is fusion cooking involving Pakistani and Sri Lankan cuisines.

Cook Time

Prep time: 1 hour

Cook time: 1 hour

Ready in: 2 hours

Yields: Family of 5 can eat to their brim

CHICKEN BIRYANI

Ingredients

2 cups long grain rice

2 tbsp. ghee

Egg yellow coloring

½ cup milk

Orange coloring

1 kilo chicken

½ cup ghee

1 tsp. ginger garlic paste

2 handfuls of mint leaves cleaned and cut into 2 inch pieces.

½ cup of cashew nuts

2 big tomatoes cubed

2 big onions sliced

2 capsicums cut into circles

4 green chilies halved

3 inch Cinnamon stick broken

4 cardamoms

4 cloves

1 nutmeg

1 cup curd

4 tbsp. coriander powder

½ tsp. cumin powder

1 tbsp. chili powder

1 tsp. pepper powder

1 tbsp. garam masala

3 tbsp. sauce

Salt to taste

Instructions

Cook rice normally.

Add the ghee as soon as the rice is taken away from the fire and stir.

Mix the milk in some coloring to get a light yellow color.

Make holes in the rice using the handle of a ladle.

Pour little milk into the holes then sprinkle some dark yellow or orange color directly from the bottle to the rice and stir lightly. Make sure all the rice has some color and the orange color must be spotted like in the picture.